GarageSpin

Songwriters and bands -- have you protected your creative works by 'reserving all your rights' with a copyright? Have you considered only reserving "some" of the rights?

That's exactly what a Creative Commons Copyright allows you to do. Many musicians, filmmakers, writers, photographers, and other creative artists are releasing their works under a Creative Commons Copyright to generate exposure for their work. At the same time, these same artists are browsing through libraries of music, film, imagery, and written word to use in new creative projects.

Here's a post on Creative Commons' blog about its musician networking site, CC Mixter, that is beginning to gain steam, and is frequented by the likes of the Beastie Boys and Chuck D.

The concept was originally generated to stimulate creative collaboration between artists, which is increasingly hampered by stringent copyright law in the US, especially since the Sony Bono Copyright Extension of 1998, which increased the length of an allowed copyright extension from 28 years to 70 years.

("What's that?" you ask? For more info, check out Elizabeth Townsend's post in support of the Sony Bono Copyright Extension, and Meredith's post against the Extension. If you really want to really dive deep (and are all for free information and technological progress) read Donna Wentworth's post at Copyfight about the battle between content copyrights and technological progress, which can apply to artistic collaboration as well.)

Ok, that was a bit of a tangent.

In any case, for music-lovers, this post boils down to this: There is an entire library of music screaming to be sampled and used creatively. Likewise, there is a growing army of sampling artists that are looking for music just like yours to use. It's worth checking out. Part of the fun is hunting for and discovering "gems" in the collection.